So compelling are these findings that Dr. Itzhaki has concluded, Our present data suggest that this virus is a major cause of amyloid plaques and hence probably a significant etiological factor in Alzheimer's disease.

The collective efforts by researchers in our group and others, and by clinicians, brought together sufficient data to convince the scientific community and the relevant authorities that LAV (later to be named human immunodeficiency virus, HIV) was the etiological agent of AIDS.

Without antiviral drugs or a real understanding of the infectious agent (scientists argued for years over whether bacillus influenzae was the etiological agent of the 1918 flu pandemic, until a "filterable virus" was eventually determined to be the cause), patients were basically on their own against the disease, and the only useful response was a public health one.

About the origin of the story, Kugel writes that it "looks like an etiological narrative, that is, the recounting of some incident from the distant past that serves to explain the way things are 'now,' at the time of the story's composition, when Sodom was a ghost town."